Design Research and Strategy
Christmas shopping season is in full swing, but one retail company stands out for its message: don’t buy our stuff. That’s right, Patagonia is telling its customers that they should NOT buy more of its products. From their blog:
What kind of crazy reverse psychology is this? Is Patagonia trying to fool its customers into buying [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · brand · ethnography · home · market research · qualitative research
Autumn Rituals: Buying Jeans
Ritual plays an important role in our lives. Emile Durkheim noted in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that ritual bookends our experience of time:
The division into days, weeks, months, years, etc., correspond to the periodical recurrence of rites, feasts, and public ceremonies.
Time passes, in part, because we create rituals to signal [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · brand · culture · home · market research · sociology · time
I loved it when I first saw it. Brandtags.net invites users to look at a logo and type in the first thing that enters their minds. I found it fascinating — until I realized it’s yet another example of poor research perpetuating negative stereotypes of women.
Type in “Oprah” and see what happens. The top three [...]
Categories: Research Methods · brand · product design · qualitative research
Brands have few opportunities to come alive, and the Web is one of those opportunities. Make sure the brand gives off the right impression. Researchers have found that a company’s Web site particularly shapes how a person views that company’s innovation and concern for its customers. In other words, the Web site is even more [...]
Categories: brand · customer satisfaction · design · goffman · qualitative research · user experience